This is one of the ARCs I got at ALA Midwinter.
I have now added a new tag to my list, "middle grade." I was going to use my "young adult" tag for this, but it's so inappropriate for this book that I finally just decided to create a new tag. I'll need to go through my blog sometime and re-tag a few things now...
Synopsis:
Ten-year-old Abby has recently moved to Smithville and started attending a new school, and she hates all of it. She misses her old school and city, where people played freeze tag the right way and peanut butter and banana sandwiches were made by putting the sliced bananas on the peanut butter, rather than mashing the bananas and peanut butter into a gloppy mess. Abby doesn't like change. She likes things neat and orderly, and one day she wants to become a judge.
One night, Abby's little brother Jonah wakes her up to tell her that the mirror in the basement is hissing. The mirror was there when they moved in and Jonah, while exploring the house late that night (almost midnight), accidentally knocked on it. Abby goes with Jonah to take a look, wondering if maybe it was all in his imagination. Jonah knocks on the mirror once, twice, three times, and then the mirror starts to suck in both of them and everything else in the basement.
The next thing they know, Abby and Jonah are in a forest. Their parents' old furniture and law books are everywhere. Abby thinks they must still be somewhere in or near Smithville. When she and her brother see an adult, they go to her for help, but she only glares at them. They see the old woman knock on the front door of a house and offer the beautiful girl inside an apple, and they eventually figure out that the girl is Snow White and they've somehow entered a fairy tale. Well, Jonah figures it out first - to Abby, this idea is almost too fantastic to be believed.
On the one hand, Abby and Jonah are happy to have interrupted the old woman and Snow White before Snow White could eat the poisoned apple. On the other hand, they realize they have messed up the story and prevented Snow White from achieving her happy ending and marrying the prince. Somehow, they have to put the story right and find a way to get back home.
Review:
The very first thing I wrote in my notes for this book was: “Exhausting.” The story is told in the first person, from Abby's perspective, and I kept imagining her saying everything in a breathless and hyper voice. She had very particular ideas about how her world should be, and even went so far as to create a list of everything in Smithville that was uncomfortably not like how things back at her old home in Chicago were. A lot had changed in her life, very quickly, and she wasn't happy about it. Actually, being somewhat resistant to change myself, I could relate to that aspect of her quite a bit.
